Her eyes were shining. “I could kiss you. Figuratively. Each rack has sixteen graphics cards. At four chips per card and 2,048 cores per chip, that gives us 8,192 graphics cores per card. We have thirty-two cards, which makes”—she closed her eyes again, her lips twitching—“262,144 graphics cores.” She looked up. “That’s a lotta horsepower.”
“So I can just use my bitcoin-mining setup?”
“No.” Her irritation flared again. “Everything has to be reconfigured.”
Evan looked at the Snickers wrapper on the kitchen counter, the T-shirt pillow on the couch. “Pack up your stuff,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“I just came up with a new Commandment.”
At this her eyebrows rose. “A new Commandment? What is it?”
“‘Don’t fall in love with Plan A.’”
42
Undone by Target
Joey stood in the great room of Evan’s penthouse in Castle Heights, staring at the tall ceiling, her mouth gaping. After the places she’d lived, it probably seemed like the Serengeti to her.
Watching her, Evan felt discomfort beneath his skin, an awareness of his posture, how he was holding his arms. He could count on his fingers the number of people who had been inside 21A, and not one of them had known Evan’s real identity.
“By bringing you here, I am giving you my absolute trust,” he said. “Trust I have given no one before. Ever.”
Joey was taking a pass through the kitchen, trickling a finger across the countertops, the island, the Sub-Zero, like a housewife at an open house. But at his words she paused and looked over at him. The weight of the moment was potent enough that it quieted the air between them.
“What if I don’t deserve it?” she said.
“If you didn’t deserve it, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“This place,” she said. “It’s like something made up.”
“What did you expect?”
“Judging by your taste in motels and your lovely safe-house decor, I thought you lived in … I don’t know, a shoe.”
“A shoe.”
“Yeah. But this? This is like a Louboutin.”
“What’s that?”
“A fancy shoe they talk about on TV.”
“Oh.”
“Where do I stay?” She looked around. “I guess I could sleep on the dumbbell rack.”
He hadn’t thought about it. “There’s a couch in the reading loft.”
“The reading loft. Of course.”
He pointed at the steel spiral staircase. “Full bathroom, too.”
She gestured tentatively. “May I?”
“Yes.”
She twisted up the stairs and disappeared.
Another human. Out of sight. Inside his place. Doing whatever humans did.
He looked over at the vertical garden. It looked back. He wondered if the plants were as uncomfortable as he was.
“This might be a very bad idea,” he told them.
He thought again of David Smith in his frayed school shirt and swallowed his own discomfort.
After a moment Joey came back downstairs, running a hand along the curved handrail as if she wasn’t sure it was real.
“Is it okay?” he asked.
“It is,” she said, “more than okay.”
“Let’s get to work.”
“Okay. Quick question: Where are the extra sheets? And pillows?”
He looked at her.
“Like for guests,” she said.
“Guests,” Evan repeated. He gave a nod. “We’ll figure that out later.”
Joey turned to the east-facing windows, gawking at downtown in the distance. The discreet armor sunshades were raised, the glass tinted. She took a step closer. The entire wall was transparent. At least in one direction.
She said, “You can see into so many apartments from here.”
Evan said, “Yes.”
She set her palms against the Lexan pane. He made a note to wipe off the smudges later.
“Did Jack teach you about the Mangoday?” she asked.
“Genghis Khan’s cavalrymen.”
“Yeah.” She laughed, her breath clouding the glass. “He said they were the first elite special-operations force. They fought without fear, beyond the limits of the human body. Know how Khan trained those warriors?”
“Built a regimen based on starving wolves.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The hungrier a wolf is, the braver and more ferocious he gets.”
“You’re saying that’s what we are.”
“Yes. That’s what we are. And this place? This place looks like the home of someone who’s always hungry.”
“For what?”
She looked back at him, her hair flicking over one shoulder. Her hands remained on the window. “For everything out there.”
Evan broke off her stare, heading down the hall to the master suite. “Let’s get to work,” he said again.
He could hear Joey jogging to catch up. He opened the door and stepped into his bedroom. She crossed the threshold and halted.
“Um,” she said. “Your bed is floating.”
“Yes.”
“You have a bed,” she said. “That floats.”
“We’ve covered that.”
“Why?”
Evan blinked at her. “Can we please just get to work?”
She looked around. “Where?”
*
When they stepped through the hidden door into the Vault, Joey actually gasped. She circled the cramped space, checking the equipment, noting the monitors. “Is this…? Am I in…? This is heaven.”
She picked up Vera II in her glass bowl. “Cute.”
“Put her down.”
“Her?”
Before he could respond, Joey spotted the 2U rackmount computer bays and beelined over to them. “Good. Good. This is good.” She checked the setup. “You already have an InfiniBand cable, so you’re not entirely useless, but we have to pick up some basic Cat 6 cables.”
“This is a state-of-the-art system. Why do we need Ethernet cables?”
“What we’re building? It’s basically a bunch of graphics cores tied together. We need to hook up the machines, and the best way to do that is using plain old GigEthernet.” She studied his blank expression. “People today. You know how to work everything, but you don’t know how anything works.”
She breezed past him, heading out. “Come on. Let’s go to Target.”
“Target?”
“Yeah, we can grab the cables there. Plus, I need stuff.”
“Like what?”
She faced him, filling the doorway. “There’s no soap. Or shampoo. Or conditioner. Or sheets. Or pillows. And I need some other stuff.”
“I can get it for you.”
“Girl stuff.”
Oh.
“Target it is,” he said.
*
Red signs blared 50-percent-off discounts. A kid stutter-stepped past, trying on a pair of sneakers still connected by a plastic loop while his mom shouted, “How’s the toe? Is your heel slipping?” A cluster of girls modeled sunglasses, checking themselves out using their iPhones as mirrors. A stern-looking father was saying, “Read the ingredients. There’s no food in food anymore.” A husband and wife were having a heated debate over detergent. “No, the lavender scent is the one that gives you the rash!”
Evan stood frozen in the wide aisle of the second floor next to Joey.
She did a double take at his stunned expression. “You okay?”
A worker wheeled a pallet piled with jumbo diaper packs, nearly clipping Evan’s knee.
He swallowed. “I’ll wait outside,” he said.
*
Evan stood in the parking structure just past Target’s sliding glass doors, breathing the night air, catching his breath. Brimming shopping carts rattled past concrete security posts, shoved by flustered parents in sweatpants. Evan kept his hand near his hidden pistol and his eyes on the circuslike surroundings. Parking disputes proliferated. Car horns blared. Remote-controlled minivan doors wheeled open. By the shopping-cart rack, kids fought over coin-operated kiddie rides.
Exclamations crowded in on him.
“—not gonna buy you a toy every single time we go to the—”
“—I was already backing up! I saw the reverse lights before I was past the—”
“—not the kind your mom uses, thank God, or the powder room would smell like the potpourri Olympics—”
And then, mercifully, Joey was there. A few bags dangled from either arm. She was regarding his face with what seemed to be amusement.
“Let’s go,” Evan said.
“Aw. You’re all uncomfortable like. That’s so cute.”
“Joey.”
“Okay, okay.”
“You got the cable.”
She smacked her forehead with her palm. “Shoot. I knew I forgot something.”
He felt himself blanch. “Really?”
“No.” She smiled that luminous smile. “Of course I have it. Let’s get you away from the big, scary discount retailer.”
He gritted his teeth and turned for his truck.